Reply To: Bulgarian history until the liberation from Ottoman rule in 1878

Surprisingly good article (despite a few relatively minor errors) for such a short size! Well done!

@aaaaa – “Why Thracians again?” Well, the simple answer is: Because of Lyudmila Zhivkova and the golden treasures. It is true though that the Bulgarian ethnogenesis wasn’t formed only by the mixing of the Bulgars and Slavs, though it would be more correct to call the third component Romans/Byzantines, as that’s what the remaining Thracians would have been by the time the Slavs and Bulgars settled in these lands (heck, some of the Slavs and Bulgars themselves had already been Byzantinized by the time the country was created). Not to mention all those Byzantine masses from the conquered territories (Krum even resettled thousands of Macedonians from Adrianople into Transdanubian Bulgaria/Wallachia, although they supposedly later returned in Boris’ times, IIRC). As for the Vlachs – yes, they didn’t (all) get assimilated, but they did live at times in Bulgaria, without any conflicts with us, and were perhaps even instrumental in the creation of the SBE, so I think they deserve a mention (just like the Pechenegs and especially the Cumans, both of which also settled in our lands and became assimilated).

@”Rex Hatson” – that’s the million leva question right there. In communist times the Turkic theory reigned supreme and virtually unopposed, simply because it was the official dogma of the regime – many people today believe the reason was along the lines of “The commies wanted to portray the Bulgars as a small horde of Mongoloid bow-legged savage nomads, who drowned in the culturally superior Slavic sea, thus by extension reinforcing modern “Slavic unity” with Mother Russia and the USSR”. Whether that’s the real reason, I don’t know. In any case, after the regime “fell”, the Iranic theory eventually gained prominence (traces of it can be found even in communist times, but it wasn’t allowed to grow then). One of the reasons, IMO, is a backlash against the communist propaganda – “The commies said we’re Turkic, so we say we’re Iranic instead” (similarly, the same type of people, usually the nationalistic conspiracy theorists, go even further and say “The commies said we’re Slavs, so we say we’re not Slavs and that Slavs don’t even exist, but were invented by Catherine the Great to suit her imperialist policies” – what can I say, we have our nutjobs as well). From another side, again a purely nationalistic one, few people here would want to be associated with the Turks, who had enslaved us for five centuries. In any case, the Iranic theories are now the main ones, though many of the more serious historians and archaeologists support the Turko-Iranic theory (though Hunno-Iranic or Hunno-Scythian would perhaps be more accurate, as the Turks hadn’t even formed as an ethnos by the time the Bulgars appeared on the scene). After all, there were no pure ethnicities back then, least of all in the steppe zone. The question is: How much and in what social stratification? F.e. were they mostly Iranic with a Hunnic military elite or was it a more equal mix? Also interesting is what was the role of the local Eastern Slavs (Rasho Rashev proposed, based on archaeology, that a part of the Bulgars had started mixing with the Slavs already in the area of modern Ukraine, before moving to the Balkans)? I don’t think we’ll get an objective answer to that question soon though, as this is one of our hottest and most debatable history topics and most of our current “popular history” (i.e. media, historian “celebrities” etc) seem all too engulfed with the Eastern (Bactrian) branch of the Iranic theory, for some reason.

@Dušan – I especially love how they all say “read history first, before writing things like that”. And by “history” they of course mean their own specific version of history, which is the one and only divine-inspired truth. Reminds me a lot of religion, now that I think of it…

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Chronica Slavorum was originally a medieval chronicle which observed life and culture of Slavs, written by Helmold, a Saxon priest and historian. Today Slavorum is focused on international audience to bring them all the information they need about events, travel, culture, history, science, entertainment and food from Slavic cultural and geographical parts of the world!